"In sex, man is
driven into the very abyss which he flees. He makes a voyage to non-being and
back." - pg 20

"If civilization
had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts."
- pg 38

"Not a shred of
evidence supports the existence of matriarchy anywhere in the world at any time...
The matriarchy hypothesis, revived by American feminism, continues to flourish
outside the university." - pg 42

"I accept decadence
as a complex historical mode. In late phases, maleness is always in retreat."
- pg 125

"The Great Mother,
like Rome herself, is the Whore of Babylon." - pg 138

"Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence.
It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness.
It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is
no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper." - pg 247

"The thrill of terror
is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine. It is imaginative submission
to overwhelming superior force." - pg 267

"Butchery is not
the point of vampirism. Sex - domination and submission - is." - pg 268

"Romantic love -
all love - is sex and power. In nearness we enter each other's animal aura.
There is magic there, both black and white." - pg 274

"Woman's flirtatious
arts of self-concealment mean man's approach must take the form of rape."
- pg 276

"Christabel [in
Coleridge's 'Christabel'] is Iphigenia meekly awaiting the stroke of the knife.
Geraldine is the high priest praying before her bloody task - but she prays
to herself, the daemonic will. Murder here is sexual intercourse, for sex is
how mother nature kills us, that is, how she enslaves the imagination."
- pg 335

"Charisma is the
radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted
personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic
man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual
self-love." - pg 521

"Emily Dickinson
is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated,
sadmomasochistic imaginist. When she is rescued from American Studies departments
and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts
of will become glaringly apparent. Dickinson inherits through Blake the rape
cycle of 'The Faerie Queene'. Blake and Spenser are her allies in helping pagan
Coleridge defeat Protestant Wordsworth." - pg 624

"Richard Chase declares,
'No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson.' He blames
'the Victorian cult of 'little women'' for the fact that 'two thirds of her
work' is seriously flawed: 'Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female
friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was
perpetual childhood.' Dickinson's sentimental feminine poems remain neglected
by embarrassed scholars. I would maintain, however, that her poetry is a closed
system of sexual reference and that the mawkish poems are designed to dovetail
with those of violence and suffering." - pg 637

"Women have been
discouraged from genres such as sculpture that require studio training or expensive
materials. But in philosophy, mathematics, and poetry, the only materials are
pen and paper. Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced
that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal,
Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome.
Men's egotism, so disgusting in the talentless, is the source of their greatness
as a sex. . . . Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of
the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating
derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and
ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species." - pg 653

FRom Vamps & Tramps

"Patriarchy, routinely
blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free
comtemporary women than feminism itself." - pg 38

"Much violence against
women originates in emotional territory that they already command. By midlife
and early old age, as the hormones of both genders change, women are in total,
despotic control of their marriages." - pg 46

"Campus speech codes,
that folly of the navel-gazing left, have increased the appeal of the right.
Ideas must confront ideas. When hurt feelings and bruised egos are more important
than the unfettered life of the mind, the universities have committed suicide."
- pg 51

"The prostitute
has come to symbolize for me the ultimate liberated woman, who lives on the
edge and whose sexuality belongs to no one." - pg 58

"I have found few
lesbians with whom I can discourse for more than five minutes without hitting
some tiresome barrier of resentment or ideology." - pg 74

"Because boys lack
a biological marker like menstruation, to be man is to be not female. Contemporary
feminism called this "misogyny," but it was wrong. Masculine identity
is embattled and fragile. In the absence of opportunity for heroic physical
action, as in the modern office world, women's goodwill is crucial for preserving
the male ego, which requires, alas, daily maintenance. It is in the best interests
of the human race, and of women themselves, for men to be strong." - pg
85

"Middle-class men,
neutered by office life and daunted by feminist rhetoric, are shrinking. Lesbianism
is increasing, since anxious, unmasculine men have little to offer. Women are
simply more interesting to them. Male homosexuality is increasing, because masculinity
is in crisis and because maternal consciousness, severed from the support network
of the extended family, has become a psychotic system, forcing the young to
struggle for life against clinging personal fantasy." - pg 90

"A pagan education
would sharpen the mind, steel the will, and seduce the senses. Our philosophy
should be both contemplative and pugilistic, admitting aggression (as Christianity
does not) as central to our mythology. The beasts of passion must be confronted,
and the laws of nature understood. Conflict cannot be avoided, but perhaps it
can be confined to a mental theater." - pg 94

"Whatever their
motives, the first feminist theorists acted as vandals and Bolsheviks. The damage
they did to culture has in the long run damaged the cause of feminism."
- pg 328